The next generation of networks are likely to integrate services such as delay-insensitive asynchronous applications including fax, mail, and file transfer with delay-sensitive applications having real-time requirements including audio and video. These applications have traditionally been supported by different network technologies and the integration between the different networks have been limited and cumbersome. In the past, asynchronous communication has been provided by computer networks that are packet-switched and use store-and-forward techniques, like the Internet. Real-time synchronous communication, on the other hand, has been provided by circuit switched, time-division multiplexed telephone networks.
Circuit-switched networks have many attractive features. For example, the circuits are isolated from one another in the sense that traffic on one circuit is unaffected by activities on the other circuits. This makes it possible to provide guaranteed transfer quality with constant delay which often is suitable for applications with timing requirements. Furthermore, information that is related to data and control are separated in circuit-switched networks. Processing of control information only takes place when circuits are created or terminated and the actual data transfer can be performed without the need for processing the data stream and controlling any congestion. This allows large volumes of data to be transferred efficiently.
The static nature of ordinary circuit-switched networks often makes them inappropriate for certain types of information flows. Traditionally, the circuits have fixed capacity, long set-up delay and poor support for multi-cast. These shortcomings make it difficult to efficiently support, for example, computer communication in a circuit-switched network. This has motivated a search for alternative solutions and the predominant view is that the next generation of telecommunication networks should be cell-switched based on asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). Cells are small, fixed-size packets, so ATM is similar to packet-switching. This means that many of the weaknesses of packet-switching are also present in cell-switched networks, particularly in the area of providing guaranteed quality of service. Therefore, additional mechanisms, such as admission control, traffic regulation, scheduling of packets on links and resynchronization at the receiver are needed to integrate support for different kinds of information flows. One of the main concerns with packet and cell switched networks in general, and ATM in particular, is whether it is possible to provide and use these mechanisms in a cost-effective way.
Shared medium local area networks (LANs), such as CSMA/CD, token ring and FDDI, are used in the Internet as building blocks connected by routers or bridges. The combination of easy expansion, low incremental node cost and tolerance to faulty nodes has resulted in simple, flexible, and robust networks. Also, the shared medium facilitates an efficient application of new multi-cast protocols such as IP multi-cast.
A drawback of the shared medium that is used today is that it typically permits only a single terminal to transmit at any time, thereby not utilizing all network segments efficiently. A design that allows the capacity of the medium to be reused may be designed, but this is often at the cost of increased complexity in the high-speed access control hardware. Access control mechanisms for a shared medium also directly depend on the size of the network and are usually efficient only for local area environments.
As indicated earlier, the two main types of networks commonly used are connection oriented circuit-switched networks used for telephones and packet-switched networks without connections that are used for computers, as exemplified by the Internet. When a circuit-switched network is used for data communication, the circuits must remain open between bursts of information which is often a poor use of the network capacity. This problem arises because circuit management operations are slow compared to the dynamic variations in the user demand. Another source of overhead in conventional circuit-switched networks is the limitation of requiring symmetrical duplex channels which add 100% overhead to the network when the information flow is unidirectional. This constraint also makes multi-cast circuits inefficient and difficult to implement. Packet-switched networks, on the other hand, lack resource reservation and must add header information to each message before the transmission is made. Furthermore, any latency in the packet-switched networks cannot be accurately predicted and packets may even be lost due to buffer overflow or corrupted headers. The latter two factors make real-time service difficult to support in packet-switched networks. Congestion avoidance mechanisms can isolate information streams of different users. These designs are, however, limited to time scale operations that are comparable to the round-trip packet delay.
DTM is a broadband network architecture that combines many of the advantages of circuit-switching and packet-switching in that DTM is based on fast circuit-switching augmented with a dynamic reallocation of resources, good support for multi-cast channels and DTM has means for providing short access delay. The DTM architecture spans from medium access, including a synchronization scheme, up to routing and addressing of logical ports at the receiver. DTM is designed to support various types of information flows and can be used directly for application-to-application communication, or as a carrier network for other protocols such as ATM or IP (The Internet Protocol).
It has been shown that the signaling delay associated with the creation and termination of communication channels determines much of the efficiency of fast circuit-switching. DTM is designed to create channels fast, within a few hundreds of microseconds. DTM differs from burst switching in that information related to control and data are separated and DTM uses multi-cast, multi-rate, high capacity channels to support a variety of different classes of information flows. For example, it is possible to increase or decrease the allocated resources of an existing channel depending on the particular requirements of the user at the time. Even though a DTM network may have the potential of creating a channel for every message, this approach may not be suitable for all information flows. Rather, it is up to the user to decide whether to establish a channel per information burst or to keep the channel established even during idle periods.
The DTM concept uses channels as the communication abstraction. The DTM channels differ from telephone circuits in many ways. First, the establishment delay is short so that resources can be allocated/deallocated dynamically as fast as user requirements change. Second, the DTM channels are simplex to minimize the overhead when the communication is unidirectional. Third, the DTM channels offer multiple bit-rates to support large variations in user capacity requirements. Finally, the DTM channels are multi-cast to allow any number of destinations.
The DTM channels require no transfer or control information after a channel is established resulting in a very high utilization of network resources for large data transfers. The support of any real-time information flow is effective and there is no problems related to policing, congestion control or flow-control within the network. As mentioned earlier, the control information is separated from the data information which makes multi-cast less complex. The transmission delay is negligible (i.e., less than 125 .mu.s) and there is virtually no potential for data loss caused by buffer overflow as in ATM. Bit-error rates depend on the underlying link technologies, and switches are simple and fast due to the strict reservation of resources at the channel setup.
The DTM topology may be structured as a ring which has the advantage of reducing the hardware requirement with 50% compared to dual bus structures. All nodes are able to communicate with each other on a ring topology by using only one optical fiber in contrast to a bus structure that always require at least two fibers in opposite direction to enable all the nodes to communicate with each other. Additionally, the load on each node in the bus structure may be unevenly distributed.
More particularly, the present invention is a single DTM ring topology having at least one expansion node including a FIFO queue. The present invention is also a method that comprises the steps of first transmitting idle messages into the ring topology until the first idle message arrives to the expansion node after having passed through the entire ring. Frames are then transmitted by the expansion node with a frequency corresponding to the cycle time. The expansion node has an expansion buffer that may receive incoming frames and store the frames until the next cycle start time. The frame stored in the buffer is then transmitted into the ring topology. If there is no frame stored in the buffer at the beginning of a new cycle time, the expansion node will generate a new frame and transmit the new frame into the ring topology.